Adaptations Film Series: Adaptation

Co-presented by Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, as part of Penn Humanities Forum on Adaptations.
dir. Spike Jonze, US, 2002, video, 114 mins, color
Director Spike Jonze delivers a stunningly original comedy that seamlessly blends fictional characters and situations with the lives of real people: obsessive orchid hunter John Laroche (Chris Cooper), New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), and his made-up twin brother Donald (also Cage). As Charlie struggles to adapt Orlean’s best-selling book The Orchid Thief, he writes himself into his own movie. The various stories crash into one another exploding into a wildly imaginative film.